The first instance of block halving increasing the price of a coin came in January 2013, when Bitcoin's reward halved from 50 coins a block to 25 coins a block. Just before Bitcoin's block reward halved, the price was $10. It's now around $500, and it has reached $1000.

A block halving reduces the Daily Maintenance Cost of a coin, helping to maintain it's price. If it hasn't been premined and there are relatively few coins in distribution, the reduction of supply should make the price go up.

Of course, there are a lot of coins out there who have basically had 75% of their coins issued in the first few weeks, which makes block halving irrelevant - that's because the problem with these coins is not the supply of new coins but that the initial "big wallets" are always looking for any opportunity to dump on any upward price movement.

So trading block halvings can be profitable - but only provided there hasn't been a premine or instamine.

Here's the schedule for block halvings for the major coins:

* Dogecoin - coins will reduce from 250,000 DOGE per block to 125,000 DOGE per block on April 28th 2014

* Litecoin - coins will reduce from 50 LTC to 25 LTC per block on block 840,000 (which will be mined circa October 2015)

* Namecoin - coins will reduce from 50 NMC to 25 NMC per block in April 2015

* Terracoin - coins will reduce from 20 TRC to 10 TRC per block in October 2016

* Bitcoin - coins will reduce from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC per block in January 2017

Most of the coins listed above are "traditional" coins (with the exception of Dogecoin), where the distribution is slow and steady and the halving only takes place every four years.

For example only about 27% of the maximum amount of Litecoins have been issued (the max amount of litecoins will be 84 million, and it will take about a century to issue them all).

By contrast, newer coins like Dogecoin and Quark, were practically "instamined". Over 75% of their coins have already been mined by a few lucky early miners. To illustrate, 247 million quark were mined in the first 6 months, and then it will be 1 million quarks per year thereafter.

Therefore be careful about hype surrounding block halving of these coins.

At the moment the Doge community is excited about it's imminent block halving, with people citing what happened to Bitcoin. But there's no comparison. Bitcoin only halves every four years, and most of the coins haven't been issued - so it's a rare event in a coin which already has supply restrictions. Doge on the other hand has a huge supply issued already and halves frequently.

If you are trading the "hype halvings" as opposed to the "traditional halvings", once you have bought, be careful to put in sell orders for a reasonable profit (15% to 25%). You are trading the naivety of people who believe the Doge halving will be like bitcoin's halving - you are not looking for the same big long-term gain as bitcoin holders got when their blocks halved.

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